Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (59 page)

Far milder comments than Wilders’s or Sogaard’s have evoked violent responses. During the French urban riots of 2005, French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut was threatened for stating that the violence had an “ethno-religious character.” In a November 18 interview with the Israeli paper
Ha’aretz
, he pointed out that immigrants of religious backgrounds other than Muslim, who faced similar socioeconomic difficulties, were not rioting. He argued that the riots were not a mere response to French racism or simply targeted at “a former colonial power” but were rather “against France, with its Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition.”

On November 23,
Le Monde
published an article that cast Finkielkraut as a bigot against Arabs and Muslims. The Movement Against Racism (MRAP) brought racism charges against him, and he received threats of physical harm. The following day,
Le Monde
quoted him saying: “The person portrayed by the [
Le Monde
] article would cause me to feel disdain and even disgust for him.” MRAP interpreted this as an apology, and the legal action was dropped. Nonetheless he was “forced to remain cloistered at home.” France’s then–Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, stood by Finkielkraut, noting, “If there is so much criticism of him, it might be because he says things that are correct.”
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In January 2008, the mere mention of Muslim violence led to threats of yet more violence. The Anglican bishop of Rochester, the Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that isolation and extremism in immigrant communities had created “no-go areas” for non-Muslims. He called this intimidation “the other side of the coin to far-Right intimidation” and criticized secularist and multiculturalist
policies that had undermined the establishment of the Church of England and called for Britain to turn back to its Christian heritage.
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Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain denounced the bishop’s comments, which he called “irresponsible for a man of (the bishop’s) position.”
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The son of a Pakistani convert from Islam to Christianity, Nazir-Ali became a bishop in Pakistan but fled that country after receiving death threats. Now in the United Kingdom, also due to death threats, he and his family require police protection: “It was a threat not just to me, but to my family. I took it seriously, so did the police.”
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He has also spoken out on the predicament of Muslim converts to Christianity in the United Kingdom and left his bishopric in 2009 to work full time on defending religious freedom.

Some actual or threatened violence over religious disputes involves a group of Middle Eastern (mainly Egyptian) Islamists who maintain an Arabic website, Barsomyat.com, dedicated to tracking Christian participants in religious arguments with Muslims via PalTalk, an Internet chat service. The site has featured pictures, street addresses, and death threats, all under a banner that showed a sheep’s throat being cut.
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In March 2009, the Rev. Noble Samuel, a U.K. Christian minister who hosts an Asian gospel TV show, was assaulted in his car by three men who tore his cross off, seized his laptop and Bible, and attempted to smash his head against the steering wheel. Samuel said they threatened to break his legs if he continued broadcasting, which he did nonetheless. Although he emphasized that his show was not “confrontational,” Samuel reported having arguments with angry Muslim callers before the attack. The Muslim owner of Samuel’s television station condemned the attack on air while Samuel broadcast, and police ruled the attack a case of “faith hate.”
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Scholars face dangers for doing historical research on Islamic texts. One scholar of ancient Semitic languages in Germany argues that the Qur’an has been mistranslated for centuries and is derived from Christian Aramaic texts misinterpreted by Islamic scholars. Even for such scholarship in obscure journals, for his own protection, he now publishes under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg.
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Intimidation is a factor within Muslim communities. Some who have merely made a simple remark, and others who have advocated social, political, or theological change have been threatened by extremists. Many of those most threatened are women working in their own communities.

On April 10, 2006, a manifesto against Muslim reformers and their families in the West was published online by an Egyptian group, giving them three days to “announce their repentance and disavow their writings … and to repent their support of the countries of unbelief and their rulers.” Otherwise, “[W]e will hunt them in every place and every time. They are not far from the swords of the righteous, they are closer to our swords than we to our shoes, they are under our eyes and ears (surveillance) day and night, we are totally aware of their hiding places, residences, schools of their sons, and the times when their wives are alone at home …”
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Targets included the exiled cleric Ahmed Subhy Mansour of the Quranist group, whose imprisonment in his native Egypt is described in
chapter 4
; his former colleague, noted Egyptian human rights and democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim; and outspoken Syrian-American ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan, described below. These and many others have continued to speak out, despite a steady stream of anonymous threats. One topic particularly fraught with danger for individuals born into Muslim communities is the position of women. Efforts to defend the human rights of Muslim women are frequently denounced as a form of “insulting Islam,” as the following cases demonstrate.

In September 2006, Seyran Ates, a Turkish-German lawyer who worked with Muslim women suffering abuse, gave up her Berlin practice after repeated threats. She had been the target of a vilification campaign in a Turkish newspaper in 2005 and has requested, but was denied, police protection. In June 2006, the ex-husband of a client attacked both the client and Ates outside the court. Ates, herself born into a family of Muslim extremists, has criticized ethnic Germans who, in the name of multiculturalism, turn a blind eye to domestic violence and forced marriages. She stated, “We must finally stop allowing human rights violations in Muslim parallel societies to be shrugged off with appeals to German history.” Her resignation came after threats left her aware “how dangerous my work as a lawyer is and how little I was and am being protected.” The German magazine
Der Spiegel
added, “Those familiar with the Islamic scene doubt whether people fighting for the rights of Muslim women and girls in Germany—lawyers, writers, social workers—receive adequate protection.”
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Another German women’s rights activist of Turkish origin, sociologist Necla Kelek, fled her home after being threatened with an axe by her father. She requires police protection to appear publicly.
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In her book
The Foreign Bride
, she drew
attention to the condition of Turkish women and girls imported into Germany for forced marriages to immigrant men and treated “as modern slaves,” estimating that 15,000 women annually entered Germany in this manner, and called for a minimum age for foreign brides and harsher punishment for “honor killings.”
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Several Turkish newspapers in Germany denounced her: “They said I was insulting Turkey and Islam.” Like Ates, Kelek also criticized German attitudes on women’s issues: “Educated Turks, just like many Germans, close their eyes and say that imported brides are a private issue. It isn’t. It undermines the values of our own democracy.”
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In October 2006, Turkish-born Green Party MP Ekin Deligoz, the first Muslim member of Germany’s Parliament, received death threats and had to be placed under police protection after she called, in a newspaper interview, for Muslim women to “take off the head scarf … Show that you have the same civil and human rights as men.” The German interior minister, Wolfgang Schauble, defended Deligoz, stressing that “what we as legislators assert with all determination is that this opinion can be expressed, and that one should not need police protection for it.”
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Some Turkish papers responded to Deligoz’s statement by vilifying her, even comparing her to the Nazis. Local Muslim leaders, while often criticizing Deligoz’s comments, firmly opposed the death threats and affirmed freedom of expression.
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A similar situation confronted Nyamko Sabuni, who became Sweden’s minister of integration and gender equality in October 2006. Born in Burundi to exiled Congolese parents—a Muslim mother and a Christian father (she does not practice either religion)—Sabuni became the first Swedish cabinet minister of African origin. Her appointment was controversial due to her efforts to fight the “honor culture,” which she views as the source of abuses such as virginity checks, forced marriages, veiling, female genital mutilation (FGM), and violence against women, particularly within Muslim communities. She has called for compulsory gynecological exams to ensure that teenage girls have not been subjected to FGM and has asserted that girls under the age of fifteen—the age of consent in Sweden—should be prohibited from wearing the veil, arguing, “Nowhere in the Koran does it state that a child should wear a veil; it stops them being children.” She has been charged with “Islamophobia” and received strident criticism from Swedish Muslim groups, fifty of which petitioned for her removal soon after she was appointed. Due to death threats, she requires twenty-four-hour security, and her staff has ceased printing her daily activities on her website.
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Souad Sbai, head of Italy’s Association of Moroccan Women, was increasingly threatened after winning a seat in the Italian parliament in 2008. She is not an active Muslim but expresses pride in her heritage, emphasizing, “I’ve never talked about Islam … I’ve spoken about Muslims who treat women badly. And this is a crime?” As of April 2009, three men faced trial for making death threats against her and other unknown individuals. Sbai, who supports interfaith dialogue and has criticized the veil and burka, suspects that radical imams “are telling their followers, wrongly, that she insults Islam.”
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In 2009, she brought a court case against “Akrane H.,” who, in 2006, penned what she describes as “a death ‘fatwa’ … for which I had to live in fear for quite some time.” In addition to telling Sbai to “begin to pray to God, leave work for men” and that “a woman who does not cover her head must be hanged by the hair,” the letter claimed she had “been exposed as a ‘massihia’ (Christian),” which is, effectively, a charge of apostasy. In a landmark ruling, the court accepted Sbai’s argument that such a claim was a de facto death threat.
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On April 13, 2007, Kadra Noor—a prominent member of a Norwegian-Somali women’s organization—was severely beaten in downtown Oslo by a group of Somali men. In a 2000 hidden-camera documentary, she had called attention to Norwegian imams’ support for female genital mutilation. She was attacked after telling a Norwegian paper that “the Quran’s view of women should be interpreted again” and reported that “while I lay on the pavement they kicked me and screamed that I had trampled on the Koran. Several shouted Allah-o-okbar (God is great) and also recited from the Koran.” The Islamic Council of Norway denounced the attack, and two suspects were arrested.
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In the United States, after promoting a more assertive role for women in Islam, Muslim feminist and former
Wall Street Journal
writer Asra Nomani received death threats, including one from a caller who said he would “slaughter” both her and her parents if she did not “keep [her] mouth shut.” She has criticized gender segregation in mosques and helped organize mixed-gender services with female prayer leaders. Critics denounced Nomani as a “troublemaker” and accused her of having CIA and Mossad links. Members of her hometown mosque in Morgantown, West Virginia, have sought to banish her for “disrupting worship and spreading misinformation about Islam.” Nonetheless, she has refused to cease her efforts for women or her efforts against Wahhabi-style fundamentalists, who she believes are gaining increasing influence in American mosques with the help of abundant cash flows.
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Amina Wadud, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor of Islamic studies, led a mixed-gender prayer service in Manhattan. The service was held in an Episcopal church after three mosques declined to host it, and an art gallery offered but changed its mind upon receiving a bomb threat. Wadud was threatened, and the service was denounced widely in the Middle East, including by the Saudi grand mufti, who called it a ploy by “enemies of Islam,” and by an official of Al-Azhar University’s women’s college, who described it as an act of apostasy.
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Stand-up comedian and columnist Shabana Rehman has received death threats for addressing questions of women, Islam, and integration through humor. In one routine, Rehman, whose family moved from Karachi to Oslo soon after her birth, comes on stage dressed in a burka, which she quips is not very practical when assembling IKEA furniture but great for scaring children, before shedding it to reveal a red cocktail dress. She criticizes arranged marriages, FGM, and sharia law, as well as Norway’s shortcomings in integrating its immigrant population. She mocks Norwegian “halal hippies” who disregard abuses within Islam for the sake of multiculturalism. In 2002, a group of conservative Muslim women symbolically excommunicated her over a protest she had staged against the honor killing of a Kurdish girl. In 2008, several months after she had promised to burn the Qur’an during one of her routines, unknown assailants shot at her sister’s Oslo restaurant, though no injuries resulted. Rehman has made such an impression in Norwegian politics that immigration debates are now commonly referred to as the “Shabana debate.” In a now-common pattern, critics have charged her with fueling prejudice against immigrants. The Norwegian immigration minister, however, praised her for stimulating conversation about how immigrant culture can be merged with Norwegian culture.
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